April 2017
Poetry is a lonely business, but I have a friend who plays guitar, and when I play bass with him, I find community. My most recent book is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 and I've had recent poems in Hummingbird, Atticus Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and other literary magazines. I'm honored to serve as managing editor of the Lorine Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region? I blog as The Middlewesterner (www.middlewesterner.com), and have put up at least five little poems a week since mid-2008.
Author's Note: I have written other fourteen line poems which, if they be called sonnets at all, would have to be labeled 'broken sonnets,' the same way that it happens when I write haiku. I play with them until I break them.
Three Possibilities on the Sonnet
O, the sonnet is a wily creature,
Slippery as a woman who knows her own
Mind. Us poets got to stretch to reach her.
Soothing rhythms and gentle words, a tone
Fine enough to woo even the toughest
Alone won't do. Fourteen lines and proper
Rhymes entice her, but throw in a stuffed fish
For confusion; confusion won't top her
Either, but it helps. O, such a poem
Is a five-legged toad, a rare critter —
If you want to have her and take her home,
A thirteen-inch toad-sticker will git 'er,
But, goodness, be quick. Else think the sonnet
A hat, three-cornered, feathered, and don it.
-first published in Wisconsin Academy Review
Three Possibilities on the Sonnet
O, the sonnet is a wily creature,
Slippery as a woman who knows her own
Mind. Us poets got to stretch to reach her.
Soothing rhythms and gentle words, a tone
Fine enough to woo even the toughest
Alone won't do. Fourteen lines and proper
Rhymes entice her, but throw in a stuffed fish
For confusion; confusion won't top her
Either, but it helps. O, such a poem
Is a five-legged toad, a rare critter —
If you want to have her and take her home,
A thirteen-inch toad-sticker will git 'er,
But, goodness, be quick. Else think the sonnet
A hat, three-cornered, feathered, and don it.
-first published in Wisconsin Academy Review
© 2017 Tom Montag
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